Once upon a time creatures emerged from water. A little later they
stood upright and walked on two feet. Later still, they began going to the
movies.

On the Lido diVenezia
every year – locus mirabilis for anthropologists – the particular
replicates the evolutionary. New festival guests wobbly from lagoon trips
stagger ashore. They take a while to find their legs. (My advice: have a Bellini at the nearest bar). Then, in a common impulse
encouraged by the primal cries of their pack leaders – “I’ve got my accreditation”
and “I’ll have that discounted festival catalogue, please” – they start
flocking into movie theatres.

The 2006 Mostra del Cinema was a hot one: 12
days of varied films about time and history. We learned, or re-learned, that human
beings are still primitive creatures, capable of being felled from perpendicularity, or of being regressed to the primeval
by ghastly events, while always looking forward to the next horizon, the next
quantum leap in development or dream.

That the fates keeps trying to return us to H2O was proved by the best
nonfiction film at Venice. Spike Lee’s 4 1/4-hour
WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE, a first and definitive documentary about the flooding
of New Orleans, is a tale of nature making a mockery of civilisation. (It
helps when the civilisation is run by George W Bush). Pulling in footage from
every news archive, and interviewing both the usual suspects (mayor, state
governor) and the unusual ones (Sean Penn, Rev Al Sharpton),
Lee creates an overwhelming panorama. It’s fed by facts and fury as the
victims of two consecutive, compounding disasters – a flood followed by
federal incompetence – remember, for the camera, a day, a week, a month that
they couldn’t possibly forget.

An overcrowded Venice schedule stopped me seeing the film to the end.
But nothing in the last reels, surely, could weaken what goes before. The
attempts by New Orleans’ citizens to find safety – a Mount Ararat in the
flood – led them to the Superdome and Convention Center, which quickly became disaster areas in their own
rights. The attempts to deal with the dead were under-resourced even by Third
World standards: bodies lay rotting for days, in 98-degree heat, on city
streets or interstate exits. And you don’t have to be a black filmmaker, though
it helps, to wonder why the poorest bore the brunt and were the last to
receive help from Feeble, sorry, FEMA, the government body appointed by
President Bush to sit on its ass denying there was a crisis until it was a
catastrophe.

Oliver Stone’s WORLD TRADE CENTER is Hollywood feature cinema’s first
word – let’s hope not the last – on the collapse of the twin towers, that
apocalyptic event in which a city had its pride and stride blown away. A
colossus lost its legs. Twin buildings that reached the sky were levelled by
terror from the sky.The event is now
so secure in modern-day mythology (nightmare section) that even a bad film
can’t quite dent its resonance.

But Stone’s film, sadly, is just that. Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena
play the two Port Authority cops trapped under WTC rubble on a day when,
though you’d hardly know it here, 3000 people died by burning, falling or
turning to dust. This mini survival tale doesn’t serve as a microcosm of that
event but a diminution of it. Platitudinously scripted,
and staged with more concern for B-movie machismo than basic reality – the
rescuers wear no masks as they roam the ruins, though we know that smoke and
ash made the place un unbreathable Hell for days –
WORLD TRADE CENTER reduces a national tragedy to a bad war movie.

With INLAND EMPIRE David Lynch was the third US director to attempt
the apocalyptic. Firing his imagination into fantasy realms giddy even by his
standards, the film scored a bullseye for some, for
others was a blunderbuss tale with too wide a target spread. Laura Dern plays a Hollywood star cast in a weirdly titled
movie-within-movie (ON HIGH IN BLUE TOMORROWS) that just might, says its
flaky English director Jeremy Irons, have a curse on it. It’s a remake of an
aborted original – aborted because its script encrypted a message that the
two stars would die.

Soon we’re into gypsy spells, Eastern European folklore and Poland
itself, where Lynch did most of the filming. Scripted on a day-by-day basis,
the nearly 3-hour film has no discernible structure, at least after it leaves
the MULHOLLAND DRIVE-style comfort zone of a movieland
tale with just enough identity crises to deal with. Once Dern
gets lost in the ‘inland empire’ of imagination – a mazy kingdom behind the
soundstage housefronts, which host more real life
than studio sets should (if you call spirit-characters and rabbit-headed TV
sitcoms real) – the plot makes Jorge Luis Borges seem like Enid Blyton.

You gotta love Lynch even so. He takes a map
bearing known mainly to Angelenos, for whom the
‘Inland Empire’ is the urban hinterland south-east of LA, and turns it into a
title with Lynchian shivers.

As well as a code term for the imagination, the film suggests that the
inland empire of Hollywood is, and always has been, Europe. From that
dark continent the refugees fled to form Tinseltown.
From there too come the stories and fables that still feed the movie town’s
psyche. Whether this dependence amounts to the purgatorial terrorworld Lynch presents in later scenes – where
Hollywood Boulevard’s Street of Stars has become a Street of Whores, ruled by
slavemasters still thickly accented from the old
world – is a pays-yer-money choice. Perhaps Lynch
resents Lalaland for forcing him to finance his
films with the French (Studio Canal). It proves, though, that Europe is still
the beating heart of auteurism, if not its
financial El Dorado. INLAND EMPIRE was made on
low-definition video and looks it, though the irrepressible director insists,
“When the image is poor it gives you more time for dreaming.”

Ah Europe!When US cinema is in
difficulties – and two other movie-obsessed movies, THE BLACK DAHLIA and
HOLLYWOODLAND, accompanying INLAND EMPIRE to Venice, suggest a Hollywood
disappearing up its own narcissism – Britain and points east spy an opening
and lose no time in exploiting it.

The best two competition flicks at Venice were Stephen Frears’s THE QUEEN and Alain Resnais’
COEURS. Two films less concerned with celebrating their own art-form would be
hard to imagine. THE QUEEN is social history as satire, poking at the British
monarchy with a sharp stick while arranging the supporting characters – Prime
Minister Tony Blair (back in the days when he was loved), his wife Cherie,
his spin doctor Alastair Campbell – around the film’s
edges like caricatures fringing a political cartoon.

Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), Duke Philip
(James Cromwell) and Prince Charles (Alex Jennings) are up in Balmoral Castle, Scotland – UK royalty’s version of
Bush’s Crawford ranch – when they hear of Diana’s death. Barely camouflaging
their lack of grief, Liz and Phil extend their Scottish stayaway
despite the agonizing of Charles. He thinks the public’s outpouring of grief,
down south in London, should be acknowledged and responded to. So does premier
Tony (Michael Sheen), who keeps ringing Her Majesty to rinse out her ears
with reason.

Your Madge, the crowds are going postal outside Buckingham Palace….

Your Madge, the floral tributes at the gates are starting to hazard
traffic and will soon imperil low-flying aircraft…

Your Madge, you’re losing the
plot. You’d better come to London now or the monarchy will be dead, unmourned and putrefactious
like that shot stag hanging in your kitchens.

Helen Mirren captures the Queen in a feat of
mimetic abduction so brilliant it would be punished by death in a primitive
tribe. She gets the face and voice, the nuance and essence. That prim fluting
treble, with condescension built into its cadences and rebuke into its politenesses, has been the Pied Piper to British monarchophilia for over 50 years. Director Stephen Frears and writer Peter Morgan (who collaborated on a
famous British TV play about the early power pact struck between incoming
Prime Minister Blair and his heir apparent Gordon Brown, skedded
to become PM next year) make her a still center for
the revolving insecurities of the House of Windsor. Philip, played with scary
accuracy by America’s James Cromwell, is an attack dog with an undisguised
loathing of the late Di. Charles is a weakling with
wavering loyalty, wanting to honour the ex-wife and the kids while keeping
warm the mistress and future consort.

Frears
can do this stuff standing on his head. He may be the great chronicler of a
mad, multicultural nation. BLOODY KIDS, MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE, PRICK UP
YOUR EARS, DIRTY PRETTY THINGS, THE QUEEN: it’s like Dickens on screen.
What’s astonishing about this new film – or was astonishing at Venice – is
that it registered with non-Brits as well as pushover Limeys. Foreigners
recognized that THE QUEEN was more than a little, local lampoon. It looks at
state authority, asks why that authority exists, and suggests that if it is
not accountable to the people, and responsive to their needs, that authority
should no longer have any authority. Are you listening, George W Bush?

There was more Anglophilia in Alain Resnais’s film. My theory is that Alain the Auteur can’t
do top-of-his-game work without homonymic screenwriters. First there was
Alain Robbe-Grillet (LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD). Now
there is Alan Ayckbourn, the Brit playwright who
sourced Resnais’s SMOKING/NO SMOKING diptych. Alan
A provides both the original play and screen text of COEURS.

The play was called PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES; it featured three
couples interacting in a story-pack about loneliness, love and the empty
spaces in human lives. It sounds the stuff of an agony column (“CherAbbie…”). It proves to be
a sweet-sour fugue for six voices, funny in parts, sad in others. Stars of
the Resnais Rep – Andre Dussollier,
Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi
– lead the polyphony, with Azema good as the
Bible-reading realtor with a sideline in homemade video porn and Arditi better as the soliloquy-prone lonelyheart
for whose foulmouthed, bedridden dad Azema ‘babysits’.

Snow falls as a transitional device between scenes and once,
surreally, during a scene. Azema and Arditi sit at a living-room table, playing strip poker
shyly with their hearts, and suddenly their hands reach towards each other
through the snow. Whiteness mantles the table. Snow falls from the ceiling.
This poetic incongruity – a turning world, defiant of time, creating its
seasons of the heart, its weather systems of the soul – is what gave
MARIENBAD its greatness and has given good Resnais
ever since (PROVIDENCE, MON ONCLE D’AMERIQUE) its grace.

Snow didn’t fall on Venice, but there was a hint of winter at this
year’s festival. The chill of challenge from the newly inaugurated Rome Film
Festival – starting in October – gave Venice a touch of ice and frostbite.
Fear glazed the usual Italian welcome with a sense of paranoia (even more
security searches than usual; were they checking for Roman spies?). It may
also have helped to sabotage the scheduling fluency we have come to expect
from Mostra director Marco Muller.

The press screenings for WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE and Kenneth Branagh’s THE MAGIC FLUTE started so late that Muller
nearly had riots on his hands. A festival boss torn apart by his own guests
is not a pretty sight; so it’s as well Muller stayed away, though he could
have sent James Ellroy to the slaughter instead.
The BLACK DAHLIA novelist was in town and one early newspaper report showed
him to be a frightening Muller lookalike.
“Separated at birth” shrilled the headline, above two juxtaposed pictures of
balding men with stern frowns and rimless specs.

The other theory is that a film festival is a place of mad convergence
anyway. Everything starts to resemble everything else. One film noir
gets confused with another. (Can you tell THE BLACK DAHLIA from
HOLLYWOODLAND?) A Truman Capote movie replicates itself while no one is
looking (INFAMOUS arriving a year after CAPOTE). And as if one British pic about a capricious female monarch wasn’t enough, we
got a second with THE MAGIC FLUTE. Ken Branagh’s
Mozart pic, set for some reason on the battlefields
of Flanders, puts the Queen of the Night atop a moving tank, where she ripsnorts her coloratura as if from a 9-millimetre gun.
Meanwhile the characters she influences with her dubious advice (“Sarastro bad, me good”) become fodder for gunfire, grenades
and over-the-top mise-en-scene.

It’s fun, but is it Mozart? Then again, maybe fun is enough. It
certainly was in the other musical grabber at Venice, Indonesia’s OPERA JAWA.
Here Bollywood meets Glauber
Rocha. GarinNugroho’s
ballet/opera, to which I was steered by the great French critic Michel Ciment, is inspired by a love-and-jealousy fable in the
Ramayana. First the costumes knock you half-conscious – their colours,
textiles, animalistic shapes – then the production design blows you away.

Vast red drapes billow high and wide above a meadow of artificial
flowers. Pantomime dragons composed of crouching dancers prance and pounce.
Human beings are interchangeable with clay statues: a kneeling girl turning
on a potter’s wheel is smeared with mud by her Pygmalion (beats the phallic
terracotta scene in GHOST); giant clay torsos and blood-smeared clay limbs
lie on a smoking battlefield. A murder of passion is committed on a seashore
in a yellow-flocked diaphanous tent, through whose waving, weaving veil of
fabric – like a cornfield or sandstorm – we watch the choreographed delirium
of love and hate. Astonishingly this is the director’s ninth movie. Where has
he been all our lives? The next time world cinema wants to film THE MAGIC
FLUTE, they know who to come to.

Only the middle phase of this year’s Venice Film Festival
disappointed. Days seven and eight should have been declared an official
disaster zone, with government funding for levees to keep out inundating
celluloid. Critics tried to flee the island – but were stopped at the
waterfront by security troops – after seeing THE FOUNTAIN, CHILDREN OF MEN
and BOBBY.

The first two were harmless, if risible, experiments with time. In THE
FOUNTAIN Darren ‘Pi’ Aronofskyintercuts
three tales of man’s quest for immortality. Hugh Jackman
trebles as a Spanish conquistador seeking the fountain of youth, a modern
scientist out to cure brain-death and a 26th century Buddhist in a
space bubble. Watching the film is like having your mind three-way-sectioned
by madmen from Mensa.

CHILDREN OF MEN, directed by Alfonso Cuaron
from a PD James novel, is a thriller set in 2027 Britain. A sterile
population goes ape when a pregnant black woman appears in its midst. It’s a
Second Coming story gone multicultural, if hardly countercultural, as the
gormless chases multiply, the countdown Armageddons
threaten, and Clive Owen and Sir Michael Caine try
to act amid the penny-dreadful futurism.

But the true disappointment at Venice was Emilio Estevez’ BOBBY. The assassination
of Robert Kennedy is the backdrop to an ersatz-Altmanesque
swirl of plots and characters set in LA’s Ambassador Hotel. Estevez takes a
role, along with dad Martin Sheen, and this clan has so much liberal cred in showbiz that it has gathered a deluxe cast.
Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Sharon Stone, Helen Hunt, Christian Slater,
Harry Belafonte, Lindsay Lohan, Laurence Fishburne…. (continued on another page). They play
guests, hotel managers, waiters, kitchen staff, political workers, flakes,
fakes and fly-by-nights: in short, what used to be called in bad Hollywood
films “all human life.”

There is no life here, human or otherwise. Threads are never drawn
together. Distance is never closed between trite fiction and true event. And
the structure is so inept that the Kennedy soundbites
and sightbites all come at beginning or end –
front-loaded, then later given a climactic spin – while the intervening 90
minutes are just sudsy, slow-rotation slosh. Beguiled by subtitles, or by the
historical heft of the subject, or by the desire to support any film about
the Kennedy dynasty in the age of the Bush dynasty, some foreign critics
thought BOBBY was a good film. ‘fraid not. It’s an
opportunity wasted and an American tragedy trivialised.

Never mind. The Venice lion managed to stand up again in stages – like
the statue in BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN – and its biggest roar was saved for the
Best Film. At once a worthy victor and a bolt from the blue, Jia Zhang-ke’s STILL LIFE
appeared at Venice in the ‘film sorpresa’ slot: a
late arrival from China, though Jia was already on
the Lido accompanying his documentary DONG.

STILL LIFE, like DONG, is set in the Three Gorges area of
central-southern China. Against the spectacular backcloth – river, mountains,
newly-built dam – Jia’s tale of a coalminer
visiting the area to search out a wife and daughter, from whom he was parted
years before, has charm, strength and a poignant particularity. This fortyish codger struck a venal bargain, a decade before,
when he ‘bought’ his bride. Now he wants to redeem his future by giving her,
and her child, a life founded on love not transaction.

Is there something here about China atoning for its Mao-years of
pragmatism and materialism? We are in a landscape of warring time-zones: this
gives the film its amplitude and beauty. Sunken villages have drowned
communal histories. Demolition workers hack away at tottering houses with
sledgehammers. Yet the Chinese future is taking a determined, even a magical
hold. Twice Jia gives his story a literal
‘lift-off’. In one shot a seeming UFO streaks across the sky. In another, a
concrete tower-structure rises like a rocket and whooshes into the sky. The
film’s realism is so assured that these two moments of outright surrealism
come as well-earned perks and pertnesses.

The director of PLATFORM and THE WORLD has been an emergent star at
film festivals for eight years. Now he has arrived, a fully-formed humanist
from a country that needs all the humanism it can get. By giving him the
Golden Lion the Venice jury was exhorting China – we hope – to respect its
screen artists. Just weeks before, we heard that Lou Ye had been banned from
filmmaking for five years for showing his SUMMER PALACES at Cannes without
permission (teenage sex, Tiananman Square
critiques). Will Venice’s pro-freedom message, if so intended, get through to
Peking? Or will a Golden Lion just reassure them they’re doing everything
right?

Politics, politics, all is politics. But not really. It was possible
to sit through the 2006 Mostra del Cinema without
seeing – for instance – a single film about Silvio
Berlusconi. Phew, hooray. The best films about politics, from STILL LIFE to
WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE, were really about people. And as all good art tells
us, visions of society are only worth having if they reveal the individual
lives that make up that society. E
pluribus unum. But
also, in pluribus unus.

For now, Marco Polo Airport awaits. Airplanes roar, gondola’s plish-plash in the lagoon and Venice 2006 grabs its page
in history. Beckoning in the future is Venezia
2007.My gondola is booked.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.